(october 2009)
Pakistan's state terrorism.
There is evidence that Pakistan has not done much to curb the Islamic
terrorists who attacked India and are very much determined to attack again.
(See this New York Times article).
As an Indian official summarized it, "The only cooperation we have with the Pakistanis is that they send us their terrorists, who kill our people, and we kill their terrorists."
Pakistan is basically fanning out terrorists in both directions: towards
Afghanistan and towards India. Both the Taliban that cause trouble in
Afghanistan and the Lashkar-e-Taiba that causes trouble in India have been
created by Pakistan's secret services and probably still enjoy some degree of
protection and support. There is no other state in the world that supports
terrorism to the extent that Pakistan does, not even Iran. Still, the policy
of the West has been to support the government of Pakistan (first Musharraf and
now Asif Ali Zardari) hoping that something will change. Nothing has changed:
the number of terrorist attacks against both India and Afghanistan has
actually increased, and Osama bin Laden is still free (and presumably living
in Pakistan).
The reason that nothing has changed is that the West keeps making the same
mistake: accusing the regime, or sinister elements within the regime, of an
Islamic country and ignoring the people of that country.
Just like Barack Obama's speech ignored the reality of the streets and cafes
of the Arab world (see Obama's Cairo speech: wishful thinking at its worst), so the Western policy towards Pakistan
ignores what the average Pakistani thinks:
the average Pakistani feels that Lashkar-e-Taiba fights for a just cause.
Any politician who seriously tried to disband Lashkar-e-Taiba would not only
be killed by the terrorists but also be criticized by the "silent majority".
The way Lashkar-e-Taiba presents itself to the Pakistani masses (and to the
Islamic masses of the rest of the world) is very different from the way the
West and India perceives it.
The West and India simply see madmen killing innocents. The Pakistanis
and the Islamic world at large see Muslims in India who are subject to the
rule of infidels (Hindus) and organization, Lashkar-e-Taiba, that obeys the
spirit of the Quran and tries to kill those evil infidels.
The West and India sees a multi-ethnic multi-religious democracy where most
Muslims see an infidel empire of almost one billion people oppressing 200
million Muslims. The idea of a multi-ethnic multi-religious democracy is
totally alien to the Muslim mind, that was not raised and educated to think
in terms of respect for other religions but only in terms of liberating
Muslims oppressed by non-Muslims (and eventually of imposing Islam on the
entire planet). Muslims see oppression where the West and India see tolerance.
From their viewpoint it's India (not Pakistan) that has a terrible regime:
they don't care that Muslims can vote in India if Muslims don't have the power.
India is a terrible place for them because 200 million Muslims have to obey
the ruling class of India, who are almost all Hindus (with the exception of
the Catholic widow Sonia Gandhi).
If anyone needs any proof of this sentiment, just count the number of Pakistanis
who marched in the street to protest the Mumbai terrorist attack.
See also
Pakistan, not Afghanistan and
Afghanistan as a Pakistani war of conquest.

(may 2009)
Another forgotten war, another forgotten people.
In a country like Pakistan that was founded on a religion (Islam) and that
later renamed
itself "Islamid Republic", the Pakistani regione of Baluchistan stands out as being
unusually free of religious extremism or violence.
There is little that the Baluchis have in common with the rest of Pakistan.
But there is something that the rest of Pakistan desperately needs: natural gas,
oil, uranium. And a strategic location at the intersection of the Arabian and
Indian oceans. Pakistan has spent 60 years robbing these people of their
natural resources. There was ethnic cleansing in the 1970s to get rid of
many of the hardcore Baluchis, and there is a tacit program of land
expropriation still going on in 2009. When the Baluchis protest, the Pakistani
leaders brand them as "terrorists" so that the USA treats them like members of
Al Qaeda or allies of the Taliban. In reality, it has become a self-fulfilling
propecy: if Pakistan keeps robbing them with the help of the USA, they will
inevitably join the enemies of the USA.
When Pakistan was created by the British, the Baluchis were one of the many
ethnic groups and did not feel too threatened. The balance of power changed
dramatically when Bangladesh seceded in 1971: the Bengalis of Bangladesh were
the only ethnic group that could compete with the Punjabis that control most
of Western Pakistan (today's Pakistan). In theory, Pakistan is still a
multi-ethnic country, but in practice since 1971 the Punjabis are almost
half of the population, whereas the Baluchis are less than 4%. The Punjabis
control the army, and the army is the main driver of the land expropriation
and ethnic cleansing that is taking place in Baluchistan.
(See the Pakistani magazine "The Herald", june 2008, "The Great Land Robbery").
China has gladly helped in the project because it hopes to get access
to that sea bypassing the Indian Ocean, that is controlled by the USA and
India, now a formidable alliance (See
India vs China: a story of waking-up giants).
In 2007 China completed the port of Gawdar in Baluchistan, and is now linking
it to the Karakorum Highway to reach China.
In its desperate desire to get Pakistan on board for its "war on terror", the
USA has de facto removed the Baluchis from the face of the Earth, and it may
accept to brand them as "terrorists" to appease the Pakistani government.
The USA keeps misinterpreting the entire history of Pakistan. Pakistan is not
an ancient nation with a strong tradition of nationalism. Afghanistan has
existed for more than 250 years, and its people (regardless of the ethnic
group) do feel that a nation of Afghanistan exists and should continue to
exist. Despite all the trouble of the last three decades, few Afghanis are
in favor of dismantling their country along ethnic lines.
Pakistan is a recent invention that never existed before in history, and its
people are united by the weakest of links: a central government and a national
army. There is no real national identity or shared history (hence the need to
paint India as the "common" enemy).

(may 2009)
Afghanistan as a Pakistani war of conquest.
Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union are often blamed for the long mess
in Afghanistan, but the real culprit may be Pakistan.
Afghanistan (that has been independent since 1747, way longer than either
Pakistan or India, or even the USA) was a relatively successful multi-ethnic
state run by a benign monarch when British India split into the independent
countries of Pakistan and India in 1947. The major aberration of that split
was the war between the two countries, that left one million people dead and
millions of refugees. Unnoticed at the time was the fact that Pakistan
wasn't any friendlier towards Afghanistan.
Afghanistan (a relatively modern country) claimed the Pashtun areas of Pakistan
on the basis of ethnic, linguistic and cultural ties, whereas Pakistan had
a purely religious (Islamic) approach to the issue.
For the next two decades Pakistan was largely busy fighting India.
Then in april 1973 Sardar Daud staged a coup that ended the monarchy of
Afghanistan. Daud resumed Afghanistan's claims on Pashtun land and
Pakistan (under civilian president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto) responded by helping
Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar stage a failed insurrection in october
1975. After another failed attempt, Hekmatyar and other rebels went in exile
to Pakistan.
In the meantime, the Soviet Union had been active in Afghanistan. Since 1956
a treaty between the two countries provided for Soviet advisors to train the
Afghan army. Over the decades that factor had created sympathy within the
Afghan army for the communist cause.
By late 1977 Daud was beginning to replace the Soviet advisors with Iranian
advisors provided by the Iranian secret service (the SAVAK), a USA ally, while
improving ties with USA allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and even Pakistan itself.
The Communist Party of India and the Soviet Union helped the Communist Party of
Afghanistan (PDPA) unite against Daud.
In april 1978 the Afghan army helped the Afghan Communist Party (PDPA) overthrow
and execute Daud, and installed Nur Muhammad Taraki as president. He and his
deputy Hafizullah Amin (the mastermind of the coup) were both ethnic Pashtuns,
and further increased Pakistan's anxiety.
Now the new president of Pakistan was
Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, a general inspired by Syed Abul A'ala Maududi (founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, the Islamic revivalist party), a general who had overthrown Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in july 1977, with help from the Islamic parties that were being funded by Saudi Arabia.
Zia realized that the communist government of Afghanistan represented a three-pronged threat to Pakistan: ethnic because of the Pashtun ties; religious because
it was un-Islamic; and economic because of its land reforms (Pakistan was as feudal as Afghanistan).
Contrary to what widely assumed, it appears that it was the Pakistanis who
pressured the USA to counter the Soviet influence in Afghanistan, not viceversa.
It was yet another case of the USA being duped by a smarter ally who had
its own agenda.
It was Zia who demanded an astronomical increase in USA military aid to fight
the communists in Afghanistan, not the USA that forced Pakistan to accept it.
Zia also realized what was happening in Afghanistan: the communist reforms
(particularly women's rights) were causing great discontent among the
traditional Islamic masses of Afghanistan.
Globalized Islam (based in Saudi Arabia) seized an opportunity to advance
its agenda and stirred the crowds.
Zia himself had not made a secret of his ambitions to turn Pakistan into the
leader of the Islamic world, and even confessed the dream of uniting the whole
Islamic region from Turkey to Central Asia
(in 2001 Selig Harrison recalled that "general Zia spoke to me about expanding Pakistan's sphere of influence to control Afghanistan, then Uzbekistan and Tajikstan and then Iran and Turkey,").
Zia probably felt that Pakistan was
not only entitled but obliged to work as the vehicle for the Arabian-based
forces (and money) of Globalized Islam to destabilize communist Afghanistan.
Pakistan began a covert program of turning the Afghan protesters into armed
"mujaheddin".
Beginning in october 1978,
riots erupted in several Afghan cities. The communist regime had to use the
same methods that Stalin had used in the Soviet Union:
an estimated 27,000 political prisoners were executed between april 1978 and
december 1979.
In march 1979 in the city of Herat dozens of Soviet citizens were slain by
the mob. In retaliation the Soviet Union bombed Herat, killing more than
20,000 people.
Pressured by Zia, USA president Jimmy Carter authorized military aid in july
1979 to arm the "mujaheddin" fighting against the Soviet-supported regime
of Afghanistan.
At the time the Soviet Union had its own ambitions on the region. While it is
not true what Pakistan told the USA (that the Soviet Union had engineered the
communist coup in Afghanistan), it was true that the Soviet Union was
expanding its sphere of influence from Eastern Europe to every continent,
as several countries ousted their pro-Western regimes or adopted socialist
agendas (notably in Indochina, Africa, the Arab world and India).
At the same time the USA was losing prestige and allies, notably Iran,
where in february 1979 an Islamic Revolution ousted the USA-backed shah.
Jimmy Carter's advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski claims that the USA saw
"the opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War" by luring
the Soviet Union into a trap; but most likely the USA was simply dragged
into it by a scheming ally (Pakistan) the same way it had been dragged into
Vietnam (by France) and would be dragged into Iraq (by Iraqi exiles).
In september 1979 Amin staged a coup and killed Taraki, but the situation only
got worse, with the Pakistani-supported Islamic mujaheddin gaining ground in
almost all provinces.
At the end of december Brezhnev ordered the Soviet army to invade
Afghanistan. The USA, under its new president Ronald Reagan, finally gave
Zia the money that he wanted, and "Operation Cyclone", the largest-ever CIA
covert operation, got underway, supplying the Afghan mujahideen with the arms
needed to fight the Soviet army.
The Soviet Union did not gain anything from this war. The USA won the Cold War
against the Soviet Union, but also nurtured its future enemy (Islamism).
The real winner was Pakistan.
Pakistan was nothing before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It became one
of the most strategic allies of the USA afterwards. By facilitating the whole
mess, Zia accomplished his dream of turning Pakistan into a major player.
The bottom line is that the Soviet Union was dragged reluctantly into
Afghanistan and the USA (despite Brzezinski's claims) was also reluctantly
dragged into it. All three (Afghanistan, Soviet Union and the USA) were the
victims of a Pakistani strategy to control
Afghanistan as a first step towards expanding its influence into Central Asia
and becoming the leader of the Islamic world.
After all, there is only one Islamic
country that developed the nuclear bomb and that today continues manufacturing
more (using, guess what, Afghanistan as a pretext to obtain funds from the USA).
And, ultimately, this is more about Islam than the Pakistani leaders would
like to admit
(read also Pakistan, not Afghanistan
for the feelings of ordinary Pakistanis).
Any country that is not Islamic should not for a second believe that Pakistan,
as it is now, can be a real friend.
It is unbelievable how quickly the USA forgot that it was Pakistan to sell
nuclear technology to North Korea, Iran and Libya.
(North Korea is not Islamic, but it was the only country willing to help
Pakistan develop missiles, starting in 1992: without missiles to carry them,
your nuclear bombs would be pretty much useless).
Pakistan matters greatly in the post-2001 world because it originally
represented a synthesis of Western and Islamic civilizations (just like
Turkey, but Turkey's proximity to Western Europe makes it less of an experiment
that distant Pakistan). If that synthesis fails in Pakistan, one wonders where
it can succeed.
Sources:
"A History of Pakistan and Its Origins" by Christophe Jaffrelot
"Pakistan and the Emergence of Islamic Militancy in Afghanistan" by Rizwan Hussain
"Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story" by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
Avoid the cartoonish "Charlie Wilson's War"

(may 2009)
Pakistan, not Afghanistan.
Barack Obama's decision of shifting the emphasis of USA military efforts from
Iraq to Afghanistan seems to be driven more by a desire to restore moral
credibility than by a carefully planned strategic investment. Obama thinks
that the attackers of 2001 came from Afghanistan, not Iraq, and therefore the
USA was wrong to attack Iraq and neglect Afghanistan. Fair. But he should
face the whole truth: that the people who attacked the USA were just a bunch
of bandits (not much more organized than the pirates of Somalia) who used
student visas to enter the USA, used paper cutters to hijack four planes
and used the planes to cause massive civilians casualties. It was not a foreign
army that landed on the coast of the USA and shot civilians with cannons or
machine guns. Obama's desire to capture the man considered responsible for
the attacks, Osama bin Laden, stems from a desire for justice (and maybe
prestige). Obama's plan
to send thousands of soldiers into Afghanistan stems from something else that
he is not articulating honestly. In a sense, he is twisting the arm of the
USA public opinion the same way that Bush did, just in a different direction.
The truth is that Afghanistan's strategic importance is debatable at best.
During the Cold War it was important for the Soviet Union: it would have allowed
the Soviet Union to put pressure on Iran and Pakistan (both USA allies)
and moved its center of mass a lot closer to important oil routes.
However, now it is mostly a place for Pakistan and India to vie for influence,
with Pakistan inevitably destined to win (because of ethnic, religious and
geographic factors). Afghanistan's international importance is similar to
Burma's: the world should have the moral responsibility to help out populations
that are oppressed by brutal regimes. Alas, the world mostly turns the other
way, as it has done in Burma for two decades.
By intervening in Afghanistan the West has taught the Taliban a lesson, but
the price has been high. Afghanistan has become again the main exporter of
heroin. Warlords have carved out their own little kingdoms. And NATO has been
stuck in an endless war of attrition against the Taliban. The Taliban have
religious faith on their side, NATO has only scant resources and weak
commitments at a time of economic crisis.
By injecting more soldiers as Obama wants to do, the (Christian) West is likely
to cause the kind of backfiring that took place in Iraq, and therefore the
same kind of escalating violence. Muslims from all over the Islamic world may
start flocking to Afghanistan to defend fellow Muslims perceived as attacked
by infidels. Bush could at least tacitly justify his "investment" in Iraq
with Iraq's enormous strategic importance. Afghanistan's strategic importance,
instead, is just not worth it. If Afghanistan falls, it will be another Burma:
an isolated country despised by all its neighbors that will slowly drift into
a dark age. Just like Burma, Afghanistan is a country surrounded by neighbors
that need little from it and would simply act to contain its mess.
As it stands, the West is stuck fighting a war in Afghanistan to defend a
corrupt and unpopular government, something eerily reminiscent of South Vietnam.
The USA's strategic interest lies with the nuclear weapons of Pakistan. One of
the side effects of fighting in Afghanistan has been to send thousands of
Afghani fighters and their "foreign" supporters (mostly Pakistanis) back into
Pakistan (where they originally came from in the 1990s, brainwashed by the
Pakistani madrasas and trained by the Pakistani secret services). That
military force is now posing a real threat to the Pakistani government.
Unlike Afghanistan, where fighters use old guns and home-made bombs which are
effective in fighting guerrilla wars against invaders but not offensive wars,
Pakistan is armed with nuclear weapons and boasts a huge army.
Many in the West assume that Pakistan is more "controllable" than Afghanistan
because its population is better educated, more westernized, better integrated
in world affairs and, ultimately, more "reasonable".
Alas, Muslim brotherhood prevails there as it does in all of the Islamic world.
The Pakistani government, army and population are somewhat willing to fight
against their own Taliban and other extremist Islamic groups, but only to an extent and only when these groups pose a threat to Pakistan itself.
The unifying force within Pakistan (across all social sectors) is the rivalry
with India, a Hindu country, as well as some level of contempt towards
the USA and Britain, two Christian countries.
Pakistanis (at all levels) view the Taliban (especially the Afghani ones) and assorted Islamic militias as
long-term allies against the real enemies (the infidels), even when they are
short-term enemies for controls of this or that region.
The one thing you are likely to hear across all Pakistani social layers is that
all Muslims of the world should be united, should never fight each other.
You are unlikely to hear any Pakistani civilian or soldier say that the
Pakistanis should unite with India or the USA, never fight against India or the
USA.
(See this poll of march 2009: 80% of Pakistanis supported a peace deal with the Taliban, 56% were willing to accept shariia law, but only 37% were in favor of collaborating with the USA).
Islam prevails over anything else. The prospect of the USA helping
create better social, economic and political conditions in Pakistan is not
welcome by the average Pakistani: it is viewed just like the USA "liberation"
of Iraq was viewed (an occupation of Islamic land by an infidel army).
The prospect of the Taliban taking over the power of Pakistan is viewed with
alarm by many, but is less likely to cause outrage. Most Pakistanis would not
arm themselves against the Taliban the way they would arm themselves against
the USA or India.
Westerners seem to neglect the fact that a country already exists that is the
worst combination of Iran and North Korea: armed with nuclear weapons, with
a track record of "proliferating" nuclear technology (it was Pakistan that sold
it to North Korea and Iran), fanatically Islamic (Pakistan became an Islamic republic in 1956, 22 years before Iran, and the constitution forbids any non-Muslim from becoming president), a failed state (there are at least three civil wars
going on, if one counts Baluchistan's separatist movement and the two main
factions of Pakistani Taliban) and a society with a tradition of religious
intolerance (the percentage of Hindus has declined to almost zero, whereas the
percentage of Muslims in India has remained the same as it was in 1948, and
Christians are routinely massacred).
In fact, Pakistan is worse than either Iran or North Korea because it is
also a land of extreme corruption, something that compares with the heydays
of the Italian mafia. Corruption is widespread both among the political leaders
(the current president, Asif Zardari is nicknamed in Pakistan "Mr 10%" because
of the cut that he used to demand on government contracts) and among
the lower-level officials (such as judges, army officers and police officers).
Mass murderers have rarely been arrested and, if arrested, rarely convicted.
They can easily buy their release from jail. Even while in jail, they still
have more power than the judges who have to sentence them.
For example, Malik Ishaq, founder of the bloody Islamist movement
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, arrested in 1997 for the murder of 70 people, has never
been convicted of any of those murders, while the witnesses of those murders
either recanted or disappeared.
(See this New York Times article)
Under a law passed in 1990 (based on the holy book of the Muslims, the Quran)
a criminal can settle his crime with the victim by paying money. This law
has greatly increased the number of criminal cases that are never brought to
justice because wealthy gangsters can intimidate the families of the victims
and offer them money as compensation: most families will take the money rather
than risk death if they insist in getting justice.
The leadership of the Afghani Taliban is probably based in Qetta, the capital
of Baluchistan, comfortably out of reach for the USA. Pakistani troops have
been fighting their own Taliban in the northwest because they posed a threat
to Pakistan itself, but they are happy to protect the Afghani Taliban in Qetta
because, from the point of view of the average Pakistani and of its politicians,
these are long-term allies: hopefully (from their point of view) some day they
will return to power in Kabul and Afghanistan will again become a dependency
of Islamabad.
History also taught them who has a record of taking over their country: Pakistan
has experienced three military coups and all three were supported by the USA.
The Taliban and other Islamic militias never even tried to stage a coup.
Put it this way: having to choose between a war against India over Kashmir
and a war against the Taliban over shariia in the Swat valley, the vast majority
of Pakistanis would probably choose the former. The average Pakistani cannot
fathom India as an ally against the Islamic extremists, but it would accept and
even welcome the Islamic extremists as allies against India. Democracy is mostly
a vague concept that needs to be clarified, whereas Islam is a certainty and
a pillar of the nation (that, after all, renamed itself as "Islamic republic of
Pakistan").
This is unfortunate because Pakistan wouldn't be the first nation overrun by
the one enemy that it was not expecting. Greeks and Phoenicians were conquered
by the barbarians of their former colonies in Italy.
Persians and Byzatines were annihilated by the nomads of Arabia.
The British Empire was reduced to smithereens not by Hitler but by the USA.
The Soviet Union was crippled by a Polish Pope and by the Afghan mujahedin.
Pakistan thinks that its mortal enemy is India and has trained its 600,000
troops to fight a conventional war against India, but it is dangerously
unprotected against an invasion from Afghanistan and dangerously unprepared
to fight a guerrilla war. The president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari (Bhutto's
husband), repeats what he is forced to say by the USA, but the army general,
Ashfaq Kayani, routinely overrules him and does the opposite (at best, token
gestures such as moving a few thousand troops from the Indian border to the
Afghan border).
That's the other problem with Pakistan. Whenever they have a civilian president,
it is not clear who to talk to. The real power has always been in the hands of
the army and of the secret services (the ISI). The president has plenty of
power to enact domestic policies, but the army and the ISI have always been
largely independent in deciding which wars to fight. USA president Obama met
with Zardari, but that's the equivalent of a foreign leader getting assurances
from Joe Biden while Obama is 10,000 kms away.
Therefore the USA has a real problem in the region (and so does India), but it
is not quite Afghanistan, unless the USA interprets the war in Afghanistan as
a way to divide Taliban forces so that they cannot concentrate on conquering
Pakistan. The real problem, ultimately, is represented by the nuclear weapons
of Pakistan. Alas, denuclearizing the Indian subcontinent is off the table
after the USA signed a nuclear treaty with India. There is no way that Pakistan
would give up its nuclear weapons at a time when India is being rewarded for
having them. And India needs them to counter the influence of China (see
(India vs China: a story of waking-up giants). The problem of Pakistan's nuclear weapons will not go away easily.
In Iraq the USA forced Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds into an unstable federation.
It rests to be seen whether it was a wise decision. It might be an even unwiser
decision to keep Pakistan united. Pakistan is a British invention (the term
"Pakistan" refers to the ethnic groups that were lumped together by
Britain, i.e. Punjabis, Afghanis, Kashmiris, Sindhs, Balochis and, originally,
also the Bengalis of Bangladesh).
The central government of Islamabad has never had full control of the country.
Baluchistan has had an independence struggle going on for decades. The wars
against India and the proxy war in Afghanistan have cemented the nation but
also spun off military powers that bypass the presidency. And now the Taliban
have carved out their own little kingdom in the Swat mountains. It might just be
that Pakistan would be a safer place if it split in a number of independent
countries, with the nuclear weapons safely in the hands of the more
democratic and secular western states (Punjab and Sindh) that comprise the
biggest cities
(Karachi with 13 million people, Lahore with 7 million, Faisalabad with 3 million, Rawalpindi with 2 million), leaving Balochistan (a traditionally secular
region) independent as a buffer with
Iran and the northwestern tribal regions independent as buffers with Afghanistan
and China.
It might also be that the USA will have no choice: Pakistan might just be falling
apart precisely along those dividing lines.

(april 2009)
The biggest crisis awaiting to explode.
Pakistan is rapidly approaching the level of failed country. It now competes with Iraq and Afghanistan for number of suicide bombers.
There are provinces both in the west and in the northwest that are virtually independent.
The vast majority of Pakistanis lives in denial of the Islamist agenda to take over the whole country.
And none of the previous problems
have been solved by the new democratic government:
corruption is still rampant, overpopulation is strangling whatever economic growth there is, Kashmir is still an unresolved conflict that makes it impossible to normalize relations with India,
and the Pakistani Secret Services still acts like a shadow government that supports the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Pakistan is a nuclear power, and proudly the first Islamic country to detonate
a nuclear bomb.
If the fragile Pakistani government falls, the crisis will be an order of magnitude bigger than the fall of Afghanistan.